SOMETHING ABOUT POETRY

I am going to write something about poetry for a change, about ideas, imagery, rhyme, metre and a number of other things connected to the subject, because sometimes it seems to me that we have forgotten things that are important - such as the fact that poetry has both physical and ideational dimensions which are often overlooked in our discussions about it. By physical, I mean that it shares something with music; it isn’t just words; its words are akin to notes on a scale. Yet, it is also words. And these words serve the function that words have in speech – namely conveying not just meaning, but also feeling and emotion, those background aspects of speech which make it emphatic or nuanced or visceral or persuasive or ironical or tender or whatever it is that puts its ideational content across to us. A poem in other words is a physical thing in the world as well as something which conveys ideas and feelings. When Mallarme said poetry was not composed of ideas but words to Degas who thought he could write poetry because he had plenty of ideas, I assume he was adverting to this physical dimension. All utterance is embedded somehow in a universe which is physical, even if it is not only physical, but also connected to ideas – because, in fact, poetry cannot be completely divorced from ideas. By ideas I do not mean static concepts of the understanding, but simply those annoying things which float in and out of your mind and which sometimes need to be pinned down and rendered serviceable to discourse. What is physical in poetry comes from the voice. Paul Valery coined the phrase “Voice in action”, for the voice in poetry doesn’t just exist in space, creating vibrations in the air which ripple through the three dimensions of space; it also exists in time and undergoes a temporal unfolding, following a trajectory through time, which of course is not divorced from its occupancy of space. So poems exist in space-time; they don’t just exist in the head. Indeed a poem’s ability to exist in space-time for longer than it takes to read it depends very much on the way its physical space-time properties generate sufficient pleasure for us to want to repeat it and install it in our ‘memory-banks’. Which implies a kind of seamless continuity between the physical and mental aspects of poetry in relation to that organisms which is ourselves. Of course, none of this can be divorced from its meaning or ideational content. In fact, it is this coming together into a unity of its different ontological aspects which makes poetry a force to be reckoned with. So much so, in fact, that the Pentagon has issued a warning against it. “Poetry presents a special risk to national security because of its content and format.” The real question however is how this unity of many apparently diverse ontological realms comes into being in poetry. How can the ideational fuse with the physical in such an intimate way? Personally, I don’t think this has anything to do with the rather overblown ‘art’ of poetry. It is not just a technical accomplishment; it is an ontological one; it pre-exists technique. Technique is what follows on from a much deeper level of fusion. Nothing special about this. This deeper level of fusion in fact operates everywhere. The apparent division between the mental and the physical is an illusory one, a product of the way we perceive things and divide them a la Descartes into separate spheres for the operational convenience of thought – especially in realms like the empirical sciences. The table is hard, therefore it doesn’t think. Well, of course it doesn’t think, but does that mean it is so radically different from ourselves? The universe wasn’t constructed from inert building blocks, then sent on its way for these inert building-blocks to interactwith each other in random ways to produce brains like ours capable of supporting thought. It embodies the principle of self-organisation at a fundamental level; and, although this principle operates in a vastly more complex way in ourselves, it is not alien to the rest of the universe. So if the physical and the ideational can fuse in an apparently miraculous way in poetry, it is because poetry itself encapsulates a universal principle working throughout the whole of nature and is itself only one particular expression of that principle. Another is ourselves and our sojourn through life and yet another is the self-organisation at work in atoms and molecules, and also in organic life-forms. So poetry has an ideational content, but this ideational content takes on a physical form, not because we consciously weld them together, but because that’s just how it comes into being.. Form and content emerge together and are not separate from each other in poetry. This reference to form inevitably brings us to such purely ‘technical’ questions as rhyme or metre. Is it a question of Thou Shalt Rhyme or Though Shalt Not? And likewise with metre? My answer can only be, “Well it really depends on the poem.” Because the physical form of the poem emerges with its ideational content, there are no pre-existing thou shalts and thou shalt nots to be obeyed. After all, it is not the poet who sets the agenda, but the poem and what that poem needs to be a good poem adequate to itself and the promise within it. The rest is dogma. The poet only lends his or her services to the poem as it is emerging from his or her pen. Personally, just as I have never written a poem simply at will, I have never been able to dictate to the poem I’m writing what form it should arrive in – whether it should rhyme or be in free-verse. Usually it begins with a line popping into my head or an idea that I must get down on paper and then I take it from there, exploring the possibilities immanent or pregnant within that beginning. Thus the question of form in poetry can’t be divorced from content, for it is no more than the physical expression of it in the world. By ideational content, I do not mean merely intellectual ideas. Poetic ideas are not intellectual and poetic ideas are not supposed to be intellectually but aesthetically satisfying. Nonetheless, poetry may make use of intellectual ideas for its own ends. What is implied by the word ideational include images, symbols, metaphor, metonymy, as well as bare ideas of an intellectual nature. Images are especially important because they anchor poetry to the empirical world. Nevertheless, a transcendental element enters here as well, which raises the poem above the merely empirical. As Paul Valery once put it, what matters is not the image on its own, but the energy of image-formation borrowed from the universe of difference – i.e., different registers operating simultaneously in the poem. It is the successful fusion of these different registers which matters in imagery, not the images themselves. These registers may be intellectual, emotional, visual, aural and so on. That is to say that the energy contained in images derives not just from the empirical realm, but also the transcendental realm of ideas conveyed by them, along with the emotions and feeling-tones they express. Needless to say, images convey this ideational content much more succinctly than if you had to explain in prose. I am being Kantian here when I talk of a transcendental element in poetry. I am not being Emersonian. I am merely referring to the fact that the synthesis poetry arrives at is one which includes ideas and transcends the realm of merely empirical association. However, in a poem, these transcendental ideas are not simply creatures of the mind. They come from the body as well, especially the voice - though you also might like to gesticulate or dance to it. These two elements act in harmony together to produce something whose potency depends on the fusing of different registers. As for the question of the ideational content itself, it is always impossible to determine it beforehand. There are no a priori criteria here. Everything is after the fact (of the poem), not before it. Poets are not thinking machines churning out work to a programme. They live in the moment, often blindly feeling their way through the maze of contingencies life happens to throw in their way, reacting to situations here, responding to stimulae there, without ever being able to find a more than provisional solution - outside the poem that is. This of course is not just true of their private lives; it also has a public dimension. Furthermore, the ideational content of a poem is never devoid of some kind of feeling tone, which may be as facetious as it may be melancholic or ecstatic. So the ideas we are talking about here, whether implicit or explicit, are not simply intellectual ideas. In fact, the very term “ideational”, is one I have lifted from Freud, who connected it with his theory of the Unconscious. In other words, the ideational content of a poem is invariably charged with certain affects emerging from an encounter with the Unconscious. Of course, a poem which is charged with unconscious affects will encounter resistances among certain readers. For example, a homophobic person will respond negatively to a poem which has a certain homo-erotic content. And this will be the case no matter how good it is. If its ideational content is unsettling to someone, the response to it will never be neutral. The important thing is what the poem embodies as a total response to the world which includes unconscious impulses and stimulae. After all, as I have said, poetry does not emerge from conscious intent. It knocks – sometimes gently, sometimes rudely - on the door of consciousness and insists on being let in.

I keep thinking of Italia Calvino's book, Mr. Palomar wherein there are so many perspectives on human psychology, imagination, reality, animals, stars and beyond...and how this slides in with poetry, and discovery...Yes. Thank you.

I agree with most of this - it seems to me clearly true - but I don't think matters like rhyme or meter are secondary. I think a great deal follows from the process of entering a poem with certain given conditions. Rhyme, meter, stanza, determined length etc are ways of moving and ways of hearing, not only in the sensory, ideational, instinctive sense but also in a historical sense. The process doesn't happen without echoes, the echoes are part of the process.

Reply

Richard Livermore

1/18/2015 07:04:06 am

Hi George. This is familiar territory. A few issues back I ran an interview with Sally Evans, editor of Poetry Scotland, who stressed these exact points. Yes, I do recognise the force of these objections. I would not disagree, but I am trying to get at the subject from a different angle - which, perhaps for want of a better name, I have called ontological. I am sure unconsciously these aspects of poetry you mention are always present as given conditions and that they, as you say, have a history. But I think they are also largely unconscious, acquired over time - eventually becoming habitual, part of the reflex of poetry-writing. However, during the immediate act of writing, your concerns are usually elsewhere - namely how do I get from these as yet unformed beginnings to something which looks like a poem. And as far as that goes, I think one is too pre-occupied with immediate material questions to think very much of the other questions you mention.

Reply

Richard Livermore

1/18/2015 05:54:23 pm

Perhaps another point I wanted to make is that there are no Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots prior to the act of writing itself when everything suddenly becomes Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not. In other words these 'Categorical Imperative' don't have a shadowy abstract existence outside the act of writing itself, when they suddenly come into force.

Edward Mycue

3/10/2015 07:06:36 am

MYCUE ANECDOTAGE

i just do antecdotes (ok for anecdotage–and besides i never could spell well, and that is why along with some slight, probably as it was later noted dys- lexia and -calcularia, i became poet of a sorta kind)

MYCUE—WRITING LIFE, SOME
“My Mother Would Be a Falconress” Read by Robert Duncan
“My Mother Would Be a Falconress” Read by Robert Duncan Uncategorized (Joseph Duemer on his site www.sharpsand.net/2008/05/23) May 23 2008 I’ve been meaning to point to this text & audio page with Duncan’s poem about his mother & now I’m finally getting around to it. It’s a remarkable poem both for its music & for the precision of its language. The beauty of this poem startles me every time I read it, but I had never heard it in Duncan’s voice.
edward mycue says: May 23, 2008 at 7:42 pm this is a poem of his i speak to others about. his work is unique. his influence is strong with me. but he is so unique he can’t be copied, can’t be counterfeited. george oppen in 1970 said there will never be another like robert, that robert was almost a throwback and after a long pause the last of the romantics. there were three commanding poets then when i returned here for good in san francisco–george oppen, lawrence ferlinghetti, and robert duncan–and across the bay josephine miles at uc-berkeley. i met them all and knew george and jo well. it was a sweet beginning. robert remained a kingdom perhaps a feod or feif, feudal almost. i met him early and through him was invited in the spring of 1971 to be a guest for an hour on berkeley’s kpfa, pacifica radio, hosted by charles amerkanian (a position now held by jack foley)and again on another for a program based on composer david durrah’s and my collaborations on jazz song and an oratorio “texas and hell” i’d begun writing in 1967. i knew robert’s high school english teacher edna keogh who adored robert and moved to san francisco when she retired from bakersfield. i worked in the bookshop at the california palace of honor city art museum and she was a volunteer there and a great inspiration and model i think she may have died before robert did, but not long before. edward mycue
an autobiog sounds like a mountain. ever the sissy, i. little bits here and there, maybe. i always wanted to be a novelist and at 18 to 19 wrote two. i actually kept one UNDER MY PILLOW in my room at arlington state (junior college then)in arlington, texas for approximately 6 months until i reread it and fell into shame & tears at how callow/young/awful/&stupid it seemed. and i burned itburned it. (i wish i’d have kept it because as billy blake wrote someplace the path to wisdom goes through the country of excess )(well close to what he said)and so there might have been something there that would reveal myself to me.) (i’m so much more lenient to myself since then.) anyway i dramatically tore it up and BURNED IT. well that was the first one. the second after a period of fallow mattresscide received the same fate but not as dramatically–more glumly.
At that time i had this english teacher from the east 1956-7 who’d just completed her dissertation on laura riding, and i got into that riding/yeats/gertrude stein trio. (you know riding and stein had a great correspondence and yeats was somehow in there i can’t recall why but i handwrote in pencil as was necessary only to use pencil every version of yeats’ surviving versions of his poems–his variorum was out or just coming out then–and returned my focus to poems accepting i would never be a star the way novelists are and become rich rich rich. i have been happy with poems.) oh a larry lawrence fixel counsel is apt here: abt the real carrot and the real stick. he said that story tellers have a real carrot dangling before them (and can become rich rich rich) but poets have the imaginary carrot and the imaginary stick. so i go for the flow, the oral tradition–yeats/stein/riding: i think of riding as my first master)(i sometimes think much of my discoveries in poetry and life have been due to misspelling, misreading, miscalculation–oops my secret is out.) my brother david mycue was the historian ( archivist and curator of the south texas history museums in the nuevo santander section of texas centered in mcallen/edinburgh along the rio grande)

(Copied here from Joseph Duemer’s site posted May 23,,2008 )

Ed
p.s. here is more memory:
WRITING, AN EXPLORATION
This is of myself, to myself, still wondering who, what ,when ,where ,how & why; & just why not)
How we begin?, Why we go on?, Who will we be?, Where will it be?, When will it end?, What’s it mean? OK, you say, we know that already: baby questions!
Three are “it” questions that you may not have noticed. (One of my meditations over years on the pronoun “it”.)
“So it was